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Work Report - Mike Crowl focuses on jobs and work and anything connected to the two.
Mike blogs in two places on Orble, and two on Blogger. His wife thinks he writes too much.
When you’re out of work you look at every opportunity going, even things that you might not follow through.
I’ve just come across the Foxy Jewelry site. It’s a kind of franchise affair (not to take off Josephine Tey - write me if you don’t understand the joke) and involves you paying a large sum of money upfront to get stock in order to sell to customers online, or in any form of direct to face-to-face selling. Foxy doesn’t go for the long-winded letter full of testimonials, the sort of letter that doesn’t actually tell you what the product is. (Though the letter isn’t short, either.) With Foxy you can check out the product(s) before you sign up because there are already people selling these goods on the Net. So they do exist, and they do have substance - unlike those ‘businesses’ that turn out to be scams, where you pay for something and then have to sell the same ‘nothing’ to other chumps.
The aim of Foxy is to provide the purchaser with a home based business. And yes, you do have to pay some money to get started - but so you do if you take up any real franchise. The sum in this case is US$497 and though that’s not pipsqueaks, it’s nothing like the figure I was given when I made inquiries about a business originating in Australia that sold tools from large pre-set-up vans. (I think it was in the region of $25,000, but that may be on the low side.) And with Foxy’s $497 you should be able to make a profit of around 200% overall
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I came across a discussion on myLot the other day about the instructions a person’s parents had given him as a child such as Sit up Straight, and Don’t eat with your mouth open and so on. The person seemed to be saying that such instructions should be left behind with childhood. I don’t think so.
Perhaps I’ve often been in jobs where there’s a need to watch how I sit, such as working at a desk (especially with a computer) or playing the piano (especially when rehearsing with singers and sitting for hour after hour).
I find as I get older that there’s an increased need to make sure I sit up straight if I don’t want backache (or more particularly pain around the right hip) or neck ache, something I’ve been suffering from since we’ve been in England. I’ve worked out that the neck ache comes from increased tension due to driving on roads I’m not familiar with and amongst more traffic than I’m used to. To avoid letting this become an ongoing problem I have to watch not only how I sit in the car, and how relaxed or tense I am, but how I sit when I’m at the computer or watching tv
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I heard about a businessman the other night who deals, if I remember rightly, with the installation of telephone cables, including fibre optics. He has a large fleet of vehicles and is big on inventory management systems and keeping track of what’s where. A canny businessman, in other words.
In an even more canny move, he installed tracking devices on each of his vehicles, without his staffs’ knowledge, so he could be sure his vehicle fleet was always where it was supposed to be.
One morning, he decided to check on the fleet, and went through the list. One of the vehicles was showing up as being 200 miles north of its designated location. He got the driver on the cellphone and asked him where he was. The driver told him he was at the place he was supposed to be. ‘No, you’re not,’ replied his now angry boss, ‘you’re two hundred miles north of that. What are you doing there?’ The driver did a bit of blustering, having no idea how the boss could know where he was, but in the end had to admit he was much further away that he should have been
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One of the things that I keep thinking about while I’m on holiday in England is what I’m going to be doing when I go home. We spent some time today with a New Zealand cousin who now lives permanently here in England, and she and her partner run a Christmas Tree company. There’s a thought. If I had ten spare acres I might be able to set it up. But it sounds like a lot of work for a season that lasts, if it’s lucky, from late September until Christmas Eve.
On the other hand, I could become a Smoothie expert. I’ve just found a site where there are a heap of Smoothie recipes, alcoholic ones, crazy ones (like a peanut butter one!), diet
smoothies, protein smoothies - you name it. The list goes on and on. Now all I’ve got to do is the marketing.
And as always, the marketing is the hardest part - as I mentioned in my piece on worm farms the other day!
I came across an article yesterday in the Eastern Daily Press on Anglian Worms (not Anglican, as I’d first thought). Anglian Worms is a small business run mostly by Amanda Jennings and is in the middle of nowhere (in my New Zealand terms). It’s actually at what they call an industrial estate some eight miles past Fakenham in Norfolk. The estate was formerly a mushroom farm, and the mushroomers left behind a large number of what look like Nissan huts. Various businesses have taken these over, and Anglian Worms rents a couple of them.
Because I’ve been interested in the idea of worm farming since I left my proper job, I rang Amanda and asked if we could come and talk to her. She was very welcoming, gave us a cup of coffee the moment we arrived, and
Amanda Jennings and some of her worms - they're camera shy.
spent the next three-quarters of an hour telling us about her experiences.
She’s been running the business for around 18 months, and is only now beginning to make some profit out of it. There have been various pitfalls, and there’s been a lot of learning. She has a farming background, and says farmers in general are helpful to one another when it comes to problems and difficulties. Worm farmers, she’s found, are keen on keeping their secrets. Not that there are many secrets, you’d think, since worms have been around a fair while, and anyway, Amanda stepped right outside this sphere of secrecy and was happy to share as much as she could with us
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One of the things about being out of work, or on holiday, is that your day becomes much less disciplined. All through the years when I worked I used to get up early and try and spend time praying and reading the Bible. Often I would write to God, or make notes about how things were going in my spiritual life. There was a sense of a patch of time early in the day when I gave God particular focus.
But since I left my job and have had only intermittent work, and since we’ve been on holiday, my time with God has become all out of kilter, to the point that I feel as though I’m losing touch with him. Other things - like opening up email first thing in the day and checking out blogs and such - have taken over. Exactly the sort of thing that I was writing about yesterday.
Plainly it’s time to get my life back into some order again, even if I am on holiday. Otherwise I have a real feeling of being very far away from God, and that ain’t good
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What is a Blackberry and what can it do? It’s another form of mobile phone, but with it you can access your email, text messages, your organizer, your mates and your web browser. The BlackBerry® “push” technology
automatically sends email to the BlackBerry smartphone so that the owner doesn’t have to miss a thing. And some of these smartphones include a camera, a media player, GPS, and the BlackBerry® Maps functionality.
It all sounds great, but what is it doing to our lifestyles? Is it really freeing us up or making us work harder, later and in those times when we should be doing recreational things - like spending time with our family.
A new Sensis report which surveyed 1800 small and medium-sized businesses and another 1500 private consumers found that 4 out of 10 people responded to business emails out of work hours most of the time. But most of them weren’t sure whether this was because they were workaholics, or whether they were making use of the technology to catch up in odd moments - or whether they were addicted to the machine. 3 in 10 people said they found getting emails out of work hours intrusive, and calls related to business were even more so
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I've just been checking out a site on the subject of promoting my blog. Most blogs I know of are about everyday things, the sort of stuff that interests the writer but not necessarily lots of other people. So to promote a blog, I’m going to have to work awfully hard to make people want to keep coming back. The ones that will come back may be just the ones who love me anyway.
So to get people to read a blog on a regular basis it has to be about something specific. It needs to be a niche of some sort. And that’s where I’m not sure that my Random Notes cuts the mustard, in the sense that it’s very random. While I may make a feature of this, does anyone else care? Is there a way to carry on writing enjoyably and yet with focus? And what particular focus? What am I writing about that people will want to read? Can I start bringing a stronger focus, say on NZ writers, artists, musicians, composers and so on, rather than just waffling and giving my opinions on these things? Would that be sufficient of a niche? After all there are already NZ sites like the Big Idea that cover these things. But the point of a blog that focused on NZ artists would be that it drew material from all over and gave it a place to be seen at. And presumably there would be expat NZeders who might be interested.
This is worth thinking about further. That way the blog wouldn’t shift right away from its original status, and it would make it more interesting for me personally. I wouldn’t be just waffling on, as I often am.
The more I think and read about blogs and their value to me as a blogger, the more I see the need to focus. My Random Notes blog is going to be more focussed over the next period so that the arts aspect gains the upper hand. Hopefully this will still allow me to be random, but within a stronger framework.
My Travel Diary is well and truly focused, and is all the better for it. Only occasionally does it slide a little away from its focus, and even then it’s not far.
My other blog on Orble.com is Webitz, which has had a focus from the start: interesting things from the Web, news on new developments, quirky Web things that come my way and so on. To me it’s the most successful of the blogs because of this. It also happens to be the only one with its own domain name, which is a factor in its success, I’m told
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Though I’m still a few months away from having to think seriously about finding a job again, the thought keeps coming up at regular intervals. Going back to Dunedin will require me to think about what I’m going to do for the next few years, whether I like it or not.
I started out working on a book that looks at finding a job that suits your skills and talents and interests, but it’s been put aside in favour of other things over the last two or three weeks. It’s something I’ll have to get back to - and soon.
And we’ve had some ideas of things I could do from home again, including making enamel jewellery. The only thing is that while I like the idea, and while I love the enamelling, I’m not sure if I really do have the talent - and patience - for this. A combination of several different strands of work kind of appeals, but that sort of approach requires a fair amount of discipline. Unfortunately a six-month holiday tends to dissipate discipline to a degree
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One of the things I probably won’t be doing when I go back to NZ after my gap year or career break or sabbatical, or whatever you’d like to call it, is get more involved with social networking on the Net.
I don’t have any problem with people doing this, and I’m sure it’s of value for a lot of them, but what gets to me after a while is the fact that ninety-nine percent of the people doing it seem to be under thirty. And as all of us older people know, people under thirty don’t know everything, even though they think they do.
The latest example of a social network site that I’ve come across is Thoof. Thoof? Duth that mean that you’f no rooff to your mouff? I really don’t know where they came up with that name, but for me it doesn’t convey too much
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What a difference it’s made to our travels this time around to have a digital camera. When we went to Rome for our honeymoon in 1974, we had a Super 8 movie camera that would take only three minutes of film before it conked out and you‘d have to put a new reel in. An expensive approach to holiday mementos.
But these days we shoot whatever we want and get rid of whatever we want when we check the photos out on the computer. And we seldom print anything out. I know some people don’t like looking at photos on the computer, but if my ancient mother could do it (in the days before she died) then I think most people can.
I don’t particularly crave anything different to what I’ve got - a camera that was expensive when it came out but has been superseded a number of times since - though I’d quite like a camcorder one of these days. There are times when a snapshot just won’t do, when you see a landscape and long to pan around it, for instance, or when grandchildren and great-nieces and nephews are doing crazy kid things. My son sent me a very short clip the other day of my youngest grandchild taking some very basic steps (with the aid of a coffee table). A snapshot would never have conveyed the movement, the thought processes, the reaching out for the remote control his father was holding, the final moment of triumph - and then the topple as he let go of the table
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Today’s work was driving. I drove from Cromer to Attleborough, and back again. It’s not a long distance, only some 25 miles each way, but it takes about an hour all up. Getting to Norwich is the first stretch, and that’s pretty straightforward - straightforward enough for us to listen to a story on tape. But getting through Norwich is painful; it’s slow and requires a lot of concentration for drivers who don’t know the area well enough. There are places where it looks as though you should merge, and then you find that you don’t need to; there are roundabouts galore; there are lights for going straight ahead but not to the right and you only find that the red light for the latter doesn’t apply to you when you‘re practically on top of it. I’ve been driving for quite a long time now - some thirty plus years - but I don’t enjoy driving in England’s cities very much.
And then there are the lanes. Because there’s so little traffic on them, you’d think that would make them easier. But the problem is that they’re virtually single lane and if you do meet someone else coming towards you, there’s usually a rapid deployment of brakes on the part of both drivers. Depending on whether the other driver is one of those people who never stops whatever, you may find yourself running up the bank. If the other driver stops, you have to edge past each other, or wait while the other person edges past you. And you can never see more than 500 yards or so ahead, because the lanes are full of corners, and the corners, like the rest of the lanes, are overgrown with hedgerows.
I guess it all adds to one’s driving skills.
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245 Posts dating from December 2006
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